NASA will attempt to conduct the historic maiden flight on Mars next Monday with its Ingenuity Mars helicopter, after the first attempt had to be delayed due to technical problems, the US space agency announced on Saturday.
The scheduled time for that first flight would be 3:30 a.m. on the East Coast of the United States (7:30 a.m. GMT), NASA said in a statement, indicating that data from the first flight will reach Earth. hours later, so they will make a live broadcast starting at 6.15am local time (10.15 GMT).
The historic launch of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter from the Jezero crater on Mars would be the first attempt at powered flight on another planet.
The original flight date, originally scheduled for April 11, was moved, initially to three days later, as engineers were “pre-flight checks and a script issue fix.”
According to an earlier statement, there was a malfunction during a rapid spin test of the small plane’s rotors, which left Florida (US) in July 2020, attached to the belly of the rover Perseverance, which landed on Mars last February 18.
At about 1.8 kilograms and the size of a football, the Ingenuity has built-in cameras and a microphone to document the flight from your perspective.
Although the flight will be autonomous, the signals the aircraft will receive will be from JPL in California.
From there, they send, among other things, general commands about altitude and acceleration, which are just parameters for Ingenuity to manage its own flight.
Those signals also go to the Perseverance rover first, and this vehicle sends them to the helicopter and then they repeat the operation in reverse to come up with the answer to Earth.
“The Perseverance rover will provide support during flight operations, take photos, collect environmental data and house the base station that allows the helicopter to communicate with mission controllers on Earth,” NASA explained on Saturday.
The Ingenuity flight would pave the way for future missions, including advanced robotic flying vehicles, collecting high-resolution images from the sky, and exploring locations difficult for rovers to reach.